Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations

by Edward A. Fox

In July 1998 the National Library of Portugal joined the Networked
Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) with plans
to support the universities of Portugal in shifting to electronic
theses and dissertations (ETDs) and making them widely accessible.
INESC is providing technical assistance through its efforts with
digital libraries, led by José Luis Borbinha. This may serve as
a model for other ERCIM organizations to become members of and
assist in the growth and development of NDLTD.

NDLTD is a worldwide federation of universities and supporting
organizations with the goal of having every thesis and dissertation
be prepared electronically and then made accessible through a
distributed digital library. Eventually this will become one of
the worlds largest digital libraries, with the potential of 200,000
multilingual hypermedia works being added each year. Its content
will make it an invaluable resource for ERCIM and other organizations.
Also, it serves as a valuable testbed since all of the important
research problems in the field of digital libraries can be addressed
in the context of NDLTD.

Beyond Portugal but also in Europe, there is an NDLTD member university
in Darmstadt, Germany. UK hosts the University Thesis Online Group
(UTOG) which is represented on the Steering Committee of NDLTD.
Since all universities are invited to join NDLTD, it would be
possible for ERCIM members to pair up with neighboring universities
and assist them in shifting from paper to electronic handling
of their graduate research documents. NDLTD aims to improve graduate
education, ensure that the next generation of scholars have skills
and understanding regarding digital libraries and electronic publishing,
and to assist universities in developing infrastructure to have
their own digital library.

Though ETDs were first discussed in a 1987 meeting hosted by UMI
about application of SGML to this genre, NDLTD only emerged in
September 1996 when Virginia Tech was awarded a grant from the
US Department of Education. In January 1997 Virginia Tech began
requiring ETDs. The figure (prepared by Beth Hetzler of Battelle
using their SPIRE package) shows a visualization of the public
portion of the Virginia Tech collection, with peaks indicating
the largest clusters and labels giving the clusters three most
common words. By June 1998 the collection included over 1100 works,
with approximately two-thirds including multimedia content, such
as images, videos, audio files, Java applets, AuthorWare and Director
files, collections of data, and VRML files. There were about 200,000
downloads to-date of the full content of ETDs, reflecting the
enormous worldwide interest.

NDLTD operates as a federation, with each university or group
having its own collection and search system. A prototype search
gateway at Virginia Tech searches sites in parallel, and includes
a simple dictionary database so English queries are translated
into German to allow searching of a German collection in Graz,
Austria. NDLTD members in Korea and Singapore will assist with
more advanced technologies for multilingual search. Since Virginia
Tech is one of the founding members of NCSTRL, the Networked Computer
Science Technical Reports Library (http://www.ncstrl.org) running
the backup server for that project, interoperability tests are
planned with servers running the Dienst software as well as those
with Z39.50 capabilities.

Virginia Tech provides support for universities to learn about
and join the project, offers about 300 megabytes of training materials
and other content to help student authors, gives software to allow
automation of the handling of ETDs by graduate schools and libraries,
and works with publishers and others to advance the goals of the
initiative.

Members of NDLTD maintain their local site and adapt the materials
available to their situation. They freely share with other members,
and have benefited from donations made by IBM, Adobe, Microsoft,
OCLC and others providing hardware and software assistance.

With the involvement of INESC and the National Library of Portugal,
NDLTD has a first link with ERCIM. Further collaboration with
Europe is encouraged to complement national projects already funded
in the US and Australia, and proposed efforts in Russia and elsewhere.
Meanwhile, researchers are encouraged to use the growing collection
available at http://www.theses.org.